Manure business smelling sweet for Kenyan farmers

At 9am, Eliud Sankare is still at home in Isinya village, south of Nairobi, Kenya, instead of out herding the 40 cattle his son has already led to pasture.

He heads to the cowshed to join his wife and two daughters, raking manure into big mounds.

Using dry twigs as brooms, they are sweeping the greenlayered droppings into a fifth pile when they’re interrupted by loud hooting.

Sankare beams excitedly and heads for the gate – his family is about to reap $150 (R 1915) for their labour.

“Prolonged drought is making it hard to find pasture and food,” he explained, estimating a third of his cattle have starved this year. “Selling manure helps me buy food and pay bills.”

Demand for manure collected from Kenya’s rangelands for use as fertiliser is on the rise.

Scientists at the International Centre of Insect Physi- ology and Ecology in Nairobi ture, said Edward Karanja, the potential of their livestock’s Livestock keepers are starting to sell manure for fertiliser, profiting from an underused resource and boosting farmers’ yields in tough times. say this manure is richer in nitrogen and phosphorous than that from enclosed livestock, which do not graze.

Crops need nitrogen to develop vegetation, while phosphorous is essential for root formation and the crop’s struc- project leader with the centre, which is working to promote the use of manure as fertiliser in Kenya.

In Sankare’s village, growing crops is not part of the Maasai community’s traditional sources of income, meaning manure has been overlooked. But that is starting to change.

On Mary Wanjiru’s farm in Kangari village in central Kenya, leafy rows of maize, beans and other vegetables promise a generous harvest, even in a season when farmers all over Kenya are expecting poor yields due to insufficient rains.

Wanjiru has been farming her one-20th of a hectare plotusing both manure collected from Maasai land and composted manure from her own cow penned on a corner of her land.

On the lower strip, where she has applied her composted manure, knee-high maize and beans fight for space to grow.

On the upper strip, where she has used manure from Maasai grazing land, the beans are ankle-high and already putting out tendrils to climb up stakes set in the ground.

“I use only manure on my farm,” said the mother of seven, who is certain she will get a bumper harvest. But finding enough good-quality fertiliser is becoming “a challenge”, she noted.

Much of this area has been planted with cash crops such as tea, crowding out staple crops. Even keeping livestock is getting tougher due to a lack of fodder for cows and goats.